Happy new year, fellow readers! On the front-page of scsc.no I state that "by day I work towards a PhD in Computer Science ... by night, I run this company." This post is about my day job. The past year or so, I've been researching ways of enabling device-free interaction with high-resolution, wall-sized displays. Let's first take a step back and consider what it means for a display to be wall-sized. The display wall I work with every day measures about 6m x 3m. 28 projectors are tiled in a 7x4 grid to produce a display with a total resolution of 7168x3072 pixels (in comparison, a 30" Apple Cinema Display sports a resolution of just 2560x1600 pixels. Hah!).

These past few days, I've uploaded my two very first videos to YouTube, both of which touch on parts of my research into interaction mechanisms for display walls. The first video demonstrates how you can navigate vast amounts of information using a touch-free interface. 16 cameras mounted along the floor enables the system to triangulate the position of objects - finger, hands, and so on - intersecting a plane parallel to the display wall. The system can detect multiple objects simultaneously, effectively making it a "multi-touch-free" system. (I refer to it as touch-free, since users don't have to actually touch the display wall's canvas in order to interact.)

My second video was made for the Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction at ICCV in 2007, and now I have finally gotten around to polishing it with some subtitles and nice (well, to my ears anyway) music from the ModArchive. It demonstrates how far-away ("distal") targets can be reached by pointing at them, and then snapping or double-snapping to bring them closer. Once the targets are up-close, further interaction can take place using the aforementioned touch-free interface. Some notable highlights in the video include using the touch-free interface to play Quake 3 Arena :-)

About me
My name is Daniel Stødle. I live in Tromsø, Norway, at 69.66° North. By day, I work as a researcher at the Northern Research Institute in Norway; by night, I run my company SCSC. I do most of my development on and for Mac OS X. My research is geared towards interaction with and visualization of geospatial data. Read more on my personal page.